Mysticism

Mysticism is where religions start. Moses with his flocks in Midian, Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the waters of Jordan-each of them is responding to Something of which words like Shalom, Nirvana, Godeven, are only pallid souvenirs. Religion as ethics, institution, dogma, ritual, Scripture, social action-all of this comes later and in the long run maybe counts for less. Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat-to put it mildly-or with a bush going up in flames, a rain of flowers, a dove coming down out of the sky. "I have seen things," Aquinas told a friend, "that make all my writings seem like straw."

Most people have also seen such things. Through some moment of beauty or pain, some sudden turning of their lives, most of them have caught glimmers at least of what the saints are blinded by. Only then, unlike the saints, they tend to go on as though nothing has happened.

We are all more mystics than we choose to let on, even to ourselves. Life is complicated enough as it is.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Myth

The raw material of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oedipus- they do not tell us primarily about events. They tell us about ourselves.

In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking, that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Naaman

Naaman was a five-star general in the Syrian army and also a leper. His wife had working for her a little Jewish slave girl who mentioned one day that there was a prophet named Elisha back home who could cure leprosy as easily as a toad cures warts. So Naaman took off for Israel with a letter of introduction from the king and a suitcase full of cash and asked Elisha to do his stuff.

Elisha told him to go dunk in the Jordan seven times, and after some initial comments to the effect that there were rivers back in Syria that made the Jordan look like a leaky faucet, Naaman went and did what he was told. When he came out of the water, his complexion was positively radiant. Naaman was so grateful that he converted on the spot and reached into his suitcase for an inch of fifties, but Elisha said he was a prophet of Yahweh, not a dermatologist, and refused to take a cent.

Elisha had a servant named Gehazi, however, who had different ideas. He hot-footed it after Naaman and told him that Elisha had changed his mind. He said that if Naaman would like to make asmall contribution to charity, he, Gehazi, would make sure it got into the right hands. Naaman was only too pleased to hand out the fifties, and Gehazi went home and deposited them in his personal checking account.

When Elisha got wind of it, he told Gehazi that the healing power of God was not for sale to the highest bidder and, to press his point home, transferred Naaman's leprosy to him. For the sake of Naaman's newfound faith in Yahweh as above all a God of love and mercy, it would be nice to believe that news of Elisha's overreaction never reached him in Syria.

2 Kings 5

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Nakedness

Everybody knows what everybody else looks like with no clothes on, but there are few of us who would consider going around in public without them. It is our sexuality that we're most concerned to hide from each other, needless to say, although one sometimes wonders why. Males and females both come with more or less standard equipment, after all. There would be no major surprises.

It started, of course, with Adam and Eve. Before they ate the apple, "the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed," Genesis tells us, and it was only afterward that "they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons" (2:25; 3:7). In other words, part of knowing evil as well as good was to know sex as a way of making objects of each other as well as a way of making love, and we have all felt guilty about it ever since. Pudenda, deriving from the Latin for "that of which we ought to be ashamed," is etymology at its most depressing.

People go around dressed to the teeth, and in our minds we go around undressing them. Again one wonders why. It's not just to see their bodies, surely. We already know what those look like. If our most abandoned fantasies came true and we were actually to have our way with the bodies that attract us most, I suspect it wouldn't even be that either. We already know just what bodies can do and what they can't.

Maybe our hunger to know each other fully naked is in the last analysis simply our hunger to know each other fully. I want to know you with all your defenses down, all your pretenses set aside, all your secrets laid bare. Then maybe I will be brave enough to lay myself bare, so that at last we can be naked together and unashamed.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Narcotics

Whether they make you feel silly or dreamy or bursting with cosmic energy, whether they induceeuphoria or hallucinations, whether they give you a sense of being all-powerful and all-knowing or a sense of drifting through space like the dawn, all narcotics offer you a temporary reprieve from reality. Needless to say, that's what makes narcotics in particular and drugs in general so addictive. Everybody wants out from time to time, and they provide a way. They provide an adventure. Most of all, maybe, they provide a vacation from being yourself.

It was Karl Marx who called religion the opiate of the masses, and the metaphor was not intended to be complimentary. Religion is only a way of making the poor forget the bitter reality of their lifeon earth by giving them pipe dreams of pie in the sky by and by. That's what Marx meant by his comparison, and the history of the church has frequently confirmed his analysis. There are other ways of comparing them, however.

For instance, whereas people who do drugs get a temporary reprieve from a reality they often find too hard to live with, religious people claim to find a new kind of life grounded in a Reality they find increasingly hard to live without. They claim also that, although narcotics may provide you with an adventure, the life of faith is an adventure in itself, because once you start out on that path, there's no telling where it may take you next.

Finally, they would say that if by dulling or sharpening or altering your senses you can get a vacation from being yourself, by coming to your senses you can little by little-often quite painfully at first, but more and more gratefully as time goes by-become yourself. That much of the pie, anyway, can be yours this side of the sky.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words